Author: mmschill

I sense judgemental eyes, and I instantly yield, withdraw. I come up with a justification, an excuse for my preferences...sometimes even minimizing my own preferences, or making fun of myself to detract from others judging stares.
I'm writing this to say I'm done.

There are people who think that a valid book sales tactic is insulting more established authors that don't know them on social media, claiming that said established author was attacking them for --when there is zero evidence to these claims. (Pathological lying)
There are certain people who feel it is appropriate to send their followers to troll established authors, or members of the SFF community. (Triangulation)

I receive at least one message through my site, professional facebook, Amazon account or via Twitter unsolicited from people I don't know. These messages ask me to read PDFs of books to either review or beta. Yes, they contain files, from strangers, for me to open.
I'm basically making this blog post to state my unwillingness to open files from strangers.

So yesterday I was thinking about an upcoming piece I’ll be writing for LitReactor and chuckled at the amount of reactions I’ll surely get. You see, I’ve been doing the columnist thing for almost a decade. It all started back home with a monthly political column. By the time I stopped writing it in early 2016, I’d received four death threats. In any case, I tweeted this: “Everyone who’s gotten angry at one of my columns should hear the stuff I don’t even bother to pitch.” The result was almost immediate; a bunch of authors said they wanted to read it. I’m all about making my friends happy, so here we are. Thank the writing deities that we have crazy, brave venues like CLASH. Let’s get started, shall we? Here are ten types of authors who can go fuck themselves (God I’m good at making friends!):

You see there's something inherently childish about judging others by our own standards. Most children take people at face value. Most children don't have a laundry list of nefarious plots. This is why we worry about kids being wisked off the playground by grinning strangers with promises of free candy and a pool full of puppies to play with.

I lost because I allowed that person what they wanted out of that interaction: dominance--to cut me down back where they thought I belonged. To hear me give a verbal acknowledgement that I'm not as important as I think I am.